A year ago, Mihail Eric wrote a blog post detailing his experiences working on AI inside Amazon: How Alexa Dropped the Ball on Being the Top Conversational System on the Planet. It’s a great first-person account, with lots of detail of the issues that kept Amazon from keeping up with its peers in the LLM space. From my perspective, Eric’s post makes a great case study in what resilience engineering researchers refer to as brittleness, which is a term that the researchers use to refer to as a kin...